New manager training: what an internal programme should include (and what it can skip)
Most management training teaches concepts and changes nothing on Monday. An internal programme of six sessions, built on the company's own routines and templates, does the opposite.
A manager programme should teach the routines your managers already have in their calendar, not a theory of leadership. Six sessions over ten to twelve weeks is enough: one-to-ones, feedback, goals, performance conversations, decisions and delegation, and the conversations everyone postpones. Each session runs on the company's own templates, and each one ends with the manager holding something they will use the following week. Longer than that and it becomes a course; shorter and it never reaches the hard parts.
Most management training fails for a reason that has nothing to do with the trainer. It teaches concepts — a leadership model, a motivation framework, a personality inventory — and then returns people to a week that has not changed. The manager comes back with new vocabulary for what they were already doing, and no change in what they do. Two months later nobody can point to a single meeting that runs differently.
What new manager training should actually cover
The curriculum is not a body of knowledge. It is the list of routines a manager in this company is expected to run, in the order those routines hit the calendar. If the company has a one-to-one format, that is session one. If reviews happen in March, the performance session lands in February. The programme is a rehearsal of the operating model, and the manager toolkit is the syllabus.
This holds for first time manager training and for the experienced manager who joined last quarter. Someone who has managed elsewhere does not need to be taught what feedback is; they need to learn how feedback is given here, on which form, against which expectations. Putting both groups in the same cohort is usually the right call, and the cheaper one.
| Session | What the manager can do afterwards | Artefact they practise on | Spacing |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-to-ones | Run a fortnightly conversation whose agenda belongs to the other person, and keep a record of what was agreed | The company one-to-one agenda and the shared notes document | Week 1 |
| Feedback | Give a specific piece of feedback close to the event, and ask for it back without the conversation collapsing | The feedback structure used in reviews, practised on real recent situations | Week 3 |
| Goals and priorities | Write team goals someone outside the team can read and understand, and say out loud what is not a priority | The company goal template for the quarter in progress | Week 5 |
| Performance conversations | Explain a rating in their own words, and prepare the conversation before having it | The review form and the calibration criteria | Week 7 |
| Decisions and delegation | Say which decisions are theirs and which belong to the team, and hand over work without taking it back | The team decision list and one real piece of work being delegated | Week 9 |
| The hard conversations | Open a conversation about underperformance, pay or an exit without postponing it another month | A written opening for a real conversation each manager is avoiding | Week 11 |
Design rules that decide whether it lands
The content matters less than five design choices. Get those wrong and the best material in the world ends up in a folder nobody opens.
- Built on the company's own templates. The one-to-one document, the goal sheet, the review form. If managers practise on a generic worksheet and then meet a different form at work, the programme has taught the wrong thing.
- Cases from the company, anonymised. Real situations from the last year, with the names and identifying detail removed. A textbook case lets everyone stay comfortable; a real one produces the argument the room actually needed to have.
- Spaced over ten to twelve weeks. Two days off-site feels efficient and almost none of it survives. Managers need a fortnight between sessions to run the routine badly once and come back with questions.
- A peer group that stays together. The same eight to twelve managers from start to finish. A good part of the value arrives in the twenty minutes where two of them discover they have the same problem with the same process.
- The manager's own manager involved. Not in the room, but briefed: they ask about the routine in their own one-to-ones, and they are expected to run it themselves. A programme whose sponsor never mentions it again is read, correctly, as optional.
What to skip
Three things take up most of the budget in the average leadership programme and return the least.
- Personality tests as the core. A profile makes for a pleasant conversation and a poor curriculum. It explains why a routine feels uncomfortable to a particular manager; it does not teach the routine. Use half a session if you like the tool, never the spine of the programme.
- Motivational sessions. The external speaker, the energy in the room, the notes nobody rereads. They are memorable and they change nothing on Monday, because nothing in them is attached to a calendar.
- Generic models with no routine behind them. Any framework you cannot point at a company template for is a vocabulary lesson. If the company does not run it, it should not be taught in the company's programme.
How to tell whether it worked
Resist the urge to measure this with a satisfaction survey at the end of the last session. Those numbers describe the room, not the work. Look instead for signs you can see.
| What to look at | The observable sign | When to look |
|---|---|---|
| One-to-ones | They are in the calendar and they still happen in a bad week | Two months after the last session |
| Goals | Every team has written goals that someone outside the team can read and understand | End of the first full quarter |
| Reviews | Managers explain their own decisions instead of passing the conversation to HR | The first review cycle after the programme |
| Feedback | People can name something they were told between cycles, and roughly when | Two quarters in |
| Delegation | Work moved down and stayed there, rather than coming back within a fortnight | One quarter in |
| Hard conversations | Problems the company already knew about are being opened rather than carried | Six months |
None of this shows up in the first month, and it is worth saying so to the board before the programme starts. A management routine has to survive one full cycle — a quarter of goals, a review, a difficult departure — before anyone can claim it took. Whoever promises a visible shift by week six is describing enthusiasm, which fades, rather than habit, which does not.
Questions worth settling first
Manager training or coaching?
Training first, coaching second, and they answer different questions. Training gives a group the same routines and the same language, which is what makes management in a company consistent rather than personal. Coaching works on one person's specific difficulty, and it is an expensive way to solve something eight managers need equally. The useful sequence is a programme for everyone, then coaching for the two or three carrying something the group cannot solve.
Who should deliver it: internal or external?
Internal, with external help to build it. The sessions land better when the person in front of the room is the head of people or a respected senior manager, because they can hold the company's own examples and answer the awkward follow-up question. What is usually worth buying from outside is the design — the curriculum, the templates, the facilitation of the first cohort — and then bringing the second cohort in-house.
When should a new manager start?
Within the first three months in the role, and before their first review cycle. The window matters: a manager who has already run two quarters has invented their own way of doing everything, and the programme becomes a correction rather than a starting point. If the next cohort is six months away, give the new manager the templates and a peer on day one, and let the programme follow.
Where this belongs
A manager programme is not a training product. It is the part of the leadership and management system that makes the routines real — the point at which a documented process becomes something a manager can actually run on a Tuesday afternoon.
Two of the sessions are worth reading up on before designing the rest: how to run a one-to-one worth the hour and the performance management system managers will use. If those two routines are weak, the programme has nothing to teach.
Co-founder — People & Management
Ana Reis
Builds the People foundations of growing companies — and stays with them until they work day to day.
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